To Revel in the Roses
by stereolightning
Summary: After Dumbledore's funeral, Lupin gives in and sleeps over at Tonks' rental in Hogsmeade. As a new day begins, he finishes laying out the case against himself that he's been building all year, but she might be winning him over anyway. Reposted as a two-parter: one from Remus' perspective, one from Tonks'.
1. Shavasana

Tonks' rented one-bedroom studio in Hogsmeade had the slovenly vibe that one should probably expect from a lovelorn twenty-something Auror who patrolled Hogwarts at odd hours and who openly copped to being "crap at household-y spells." Her black Radiohead shirt and filmy, fluorescent green brassiere curled around each other at the edge of the bed like a pair of cats. A copper-bottomed pan soaped itself half-heartedly in the sink.

Remus found it oddly comforting.

Her mess reminded him of the last (and maybe the only) indolent moment of his life – the summer after sixth year, which he and his three best friends had spent getting stoned and listening to obscure records and refining obscure spellwork in Sirius' catastrophically untidy bedroom in Godric's Hollow. That was the last moment when any of them were remotely carefree. Everything changed in seventh year; it all went serious, and it never changed back.

That was the thing about dark turns of events: they never seemed to un-turn. There was no light turn of events just around the corner. There were just more and more dark turns around darker corners, until you got so deep into the labyrinth of dark turns that the monster ate you. Or you became the monster and ate everyone else. Remus felt he could go either way on that last point.

Grey morning light staggered drunkenly through the grimy window, illuminating Tonks' pale, sleeping face.

Last night, after Dumbledore's funeral, she had taken Remus' hand and dragged him back here, and he had let her. He didn't have the will left to refuse her. They had collapsed into bed, skipped dinner, and fallen asleep, hardly speaking at all. Their nerves were raw, and their grief was fierce. And what was there to say? That a great man was dead, and nobody knew for certain why?

Well, Remus knew a little of why. He knew it had been Snape. And – because somehow everything was just a little bit Remus' fault – Remus suspected that he himself had nudged Snape down that path when they were boys. Couldn't he have stuck up for Severus when James and Sirius vented their adolescent vitriol at him? Couldn't Remus have prevented this twenty years ago if he hadn't been such an abysmal coward?

So there was that to think about, along with everything else.

Tonks breathed softly in and out, her nose whistling. Remus pressed his forehead against hers. Even with her mousy hair, she had that high-cheekbones, long-legs beauty common to the Black family. She also had a button-y nose and a small, puckered mouth like a geisha in a Japanese woodblock print. Contradictory. Not unlike the way she often began a sentence with "wotcher" and ended it with some spectacularly complex, Auror-y observation about patterns or probability.

A fabulous bird indeed, James would have said.

A fabulous bird.

And here she was, his very own Little Red Riding Hood, in bed with the wolf and totally untroubled by it. _The better to disappoint you with, my dear._

Her eyes were still puffy from yesterday's weeping.

He wondered if she had expected him to sleep with her. He hadn't, of course. Celibacy was the best policy for the semi-responsible werewolf, and he had held tightly to it. Even when Tonks had fallen asleep next to him on the sofa at Grimmauld Place over a year ago, with her hand on his thigh, he had resisted the impulse to reciprocate. Her trust and casual intimacy were so blindingly lovely it hurt to think about them.

Perhaps her ears were burning, because she stirred and opened her eyes.

"Wotcher," she croaked.

"I thought I'd make tea," Remus said.

"Do," she said. "Sugar's in the breadbox."

"Budge over. I don't want to crush you."

"You can't. I'm uncrushable."

But she did budge over, and Remus scooted out of bed and found his wand. He started the kettle going and poked around in her cupboard. More twenty-something nonsense. Crisps and Jaffa cakes and Tequila. If they were going to get a decent breakfast, they were going to have to leave the house.

Tonks uncurled her long, leggy body and padded across to Remus.

"_Tadasana_," she said, folding her hands and standing perfectly straight. "That's the first part, yeah? Of a sun salutation?"

He pushed his greying fringe out of his eyes. "You have a very long memory."

She shrugged. "Have to. Part of the job description. Do you still do this every morning?"

"Usually."

"Show me how again."

He walked her through the basic sequence – bending forward, stretching out, tenting up – and she followed astutely. They both bent back into downward dog.

"Does this help? After your transformations, I mean. Oops!" She had knocked over a ceramic cat perched on the windowsill.

"Sometimes."

It was alright for her to ask him this sort of question. As a Metamorphmagus, she knew what it was to change form – though of course her transformations were willing. Or usually willing. She had been known to turn her hair blue mid-hiccup. Until this year, when she seemed unable to transform at all. Crippled, he knew, by her unrequited affection. Well, not so much unrequited as painstakingly withheld for her own good.

He stood up again, and she copied him.

"_Namaste_," she said, grinning.

"Same to you," he said, pouring hot water into a couple of chipped mugs. She tucked a dried-out-looking teabag into each one and swirled them around with her wand. Leaning in closer, she kissed Remus on the cheek. Again, with that soft, puckering geisha mouth.

"I'm glad you stayed," she said.

He knew what she was doing. She was flirting. She was good at it, too. His heart beat faster, even though he begged it not to. He tried a little yoga breathing to slow it down. _In. Out. Let go. Let go of all attachments. _It did not do for a werewolf to have attachments. Even if he very much wanted them.

"Do you know about the secret passage under this building?" he asked, turning his body away from her.

"There's a secret passage?" she asked. "How do you know that?"

"I used to run with a pretty rough crowd," he said.

She poked him affectionately in the shoulder. "And where does it lead, this mysterious passage?"

"What, deny an Auror a chance to solve a mystery?"

She smiled. He sipped his tea. A mystery would be an excellent distraction. From grief, from flirtation, from all of it.

…

As it turned out, Tonks deduced the origin and destination of the secret passage inside of thirty minutes. (Honeydukes to Hogwarts. Ten points to Hufflepuff. Never challenge an Auror to a guessing game.) Meanwhile, they dressed, stopped at the shop on the corner, bought eggs and potatoes and ketchup, and knocked up an eclectic if inelegant breakfast in her kitchen.

Here was the truth about grieving: it didn't much matter what you ate. It was better if it was awful.

Remus cast a self-scrubbing charm – somewhat more precise than hers had been – at the dishes.

He realized too late that the morning's easy conversation had lulled him into a false sense of security, because Tonks chose that moment to resume her campaign.

"Have you thought about what I said?" she asked.

He could have pretended not to know what she was talking about, but that routine was getting pretty stale. He knew she referred to her outburst in the hospital wing a few days ago.

Remus made his most schoolmaster-y face and met her eyes. Merlin, she was pretty. "I have."

She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans. "And?"

_Stop dawdling in the forest, Little Red._

"You know my position."

"And _you _know that _I _don't care." She gave him a fierce look that could have given Bellatrix a run for her money. Except for the water edging up her eyelids, which she wiped away with the back of her hand.

He sighed and sat down at her tiny kitchen table. She sat across from him and pressed her knees against his. "Did you know that I used to live with Harry's parents?" he asked.

"No," she said, humoring him and leaning back in her chair, "I didn't."

"This was a million years ago, after we left school. For a very short time. Couldn't have asked for better flatmates. They were–" he stopped himself slipping into that dark labyrinth just in time to finish the sentence – "they were funny. Used to leave little messages all over the house for each other, and for me. On the bathroom mirror, in between the pages of books, that sort of thing. And you could always tell when they were, well, in _bed_ together, because of the laughter. There was always this crescendo of laughter."

She smiled. "Very sweet," she said.

He nodded. "So it went on like that for a few weeks. They even tried locking me in the study during a full moon, but it went badly. I think the wolf could smell them. I think he – I – knew they were there and tried that much harder to break down the door. So James had to transform. He was an Animagus, like Sirius. I don't know if you knew."

"Sirius said."

"Ah. Alright. Well, you can see where this is going, I'm sure. It is impractical to keep a werewolf as a pet."

"Don't say it like that." She nudged his knee with hers. "I hate when you do that."

He continued, undeterred. "James was like you. Optimistic. I told him I couldn't stay anymore, and he came up with all sorts of schemes for how we would make it work. If we just took this precaution here, had this backup there. But then they found out about Harry. Those contraceptive charms aren't foolproof, you know. And that was when I got my druthers and left."

She frowned at him.

"My point is, Nymphadora, there comes a point when you can no longer say 'I don't care.' There comes a point when you _will_ care. When there are people other than yourself involved. Imagine if I had bitten Harry, on top of everything else he's had to deal with. And besides, you may be able to change your hair around, but you can't turn into anything large enough or nonhuman enough to handle a werewolf in an emergency. That alone ought to be enough to deter you."

"It doesn't," she said.

He sighed. "I know." He bunched up a handful of the striped orange curtains and looked out the grungy window. "I spent so much time here in the village when I was at school. This almost feels like home."

"You're changing the subject," she said.

"Well, that was the 'nuclear option,' as the Muggles say. I can't warn you any more sternly than that."

She leaned forward and kissed him on the bridge of his nose, right between his eyes. "No more excuses, then," she said.

...

The moon was waxing, and he was more knackered than he cared to admit, and he took a nap in her bed around noon. Or, more accurately, he offered to leave and she chivvied him into bed as if he were a fussy five-year-old. She then perched on the bed, cross-legged, and read aloud to him – first some Restoration-era metaphysical poetry that they agreed was too much to endure right now, and then a book of wizarding children's rhymes. Some of these rhymes, Remus noted, had a naughty double entendre for any grownups within earshot. She laughed at these – a cute, snuffling laugh.

He sprawled beneath her cheerful patchwork quilt, blinking heavily at the ceiling. _Shavasana._ Corpse pose. Some practitioners of yoga see it as practice for death. Others see it merely as deep relaxation.

He fell into an odd waking dream. He could still sort of hear her, and the ridiculous rhymes, but he had one foot in his unconscious.

He stood waist-deep in the wreckage of his old life, while the flotsam of dashed hopes and lost friends bobbed around him. He surveyed the debris, and remembered – Sirius, gone. Lily and James, gone. Peter, long since mutinied and given them all up for dead. And finally, Dumbledore, his patron and idol and friend, gone.

At long last, he said goodbye to them. A real goodbye, releasing them from his white-knuckled grip on their memory. It took more than a little yoga breathing for that. _In. Out. Let them go._ Tide in, tide out.

He turned and looked up at the empty, moonlit beach. And there was Tonks, radiant and neon pink, stretching out her hand to him.

She was calling him back from the boundary between life and death.

He sloshed through the cold salt water, up the pebbly shore, and took her warm hand. She was alive. She was here.

He woke, and blinked.

She was still here.

And her hair was slowly turning pink.


	2. On and On (At the Tavern and After)

Tonks knew Remus was happy, even though he periodically stared into the dark, velvet abyss of oatmeal stout in his pint glass and massaged his temples. Because when he wasn't doing those things, he was cracking jokes of surprising frankness and polishing her knuckles with both of his thumbs. Perhaps it was because the tavern was almost empty that he permitted himself to display affection. She found the dry, callused pads of his fingers on her skin thrillingly sexy.

They were married. Quick as that. A week ago she had thought he would rather court his own death down every available dark alley than admit to loving her, and now they were married. As of three o'clock today. She felt so happy she could scream, but the proceedings retained an unreality that did not quite allow her to let her guard down. _Constant vigilance._

And Dumbledore's funeral was still fresh in their minds.

But she hadn't wanted to wear black to her wedding. Nor white. So she had thrown on blue tights and a red cheongsam chopped off at the thigh, which she'd found at a jumble sale. Remus had accused her of dressing like a Spice Girl. Then his face had contorted into a grin of such boyish glee that for a moment you could hardly tell that he'd just spent a year in a subterranean purgatory with Fenrir Greyback. _The marauder lives_, she had thought, laughing and wondering if she could do her nose like Geri Halliwell's as a funny good-morning tomorrow. The hair was metamorphosing properly again, but the rest was still a bit shaky.

She plunked down a few pound notes on the bar and received another pair of beers in exchange.

"You should know better than to get a werewolf drunk. You know that saying," Remus said.

Was this another joke? "There isn't one, is there?" she asked.

"Yes, you must know it. It's a proverb. Or maybe a limerick. A wolf with a pint something something waning moon something something hide your daughters. Does this not sound familiar? Maybe it fell out of vogue before your time."

She poked him in the arm. "Hide your daughters, is it? That sounds promising."

His lips twisted into a wicked smirk and he hid his face in his glass.

"Anyway, you'd never let yourself get drunk. You're too sensible and reserved," she said.

"Oh, I've been blotto once or twice." With one hand, he untangled a lock of her hair that had caught in her dangly silver earring. "I'm sorry to shatter your illusions about me, but I feel it's my uxorial duty."

She grinned. "Blotto, eh?"

"Yes. In my youth. Pissed. Brahmsed. Rat-arsed," he said, enunciating each word and trilling the r's with so much gusto that she sniggered. "And, of course, I was a teenager in the seventies. So you can imagine."

"What a deplorable character you must have been."

"Indeed."

Apparently he really was beginning to meditate on his imagined moral failings, because he looked like he was about to sink into the black hole of stout again, so she distracted him by straightening his collar, which did not really need straightening. This shirt was his nicest one, she knew. White with little blue pinstripes. It hung loose on him, after that awful year under ground. She ordered a plate of greasy chips and pushed them under his nose.

"Here," she said. "Tuck in."

"You sound like Molly."

"Good. I defer to Molly's judgment in all things husband-related."

She caught him staring at her wedding ring as she liberated a chip. In the low light by the bar, the diamond flashed like bluebell flames.

A few minutes later, he got up to send an owl to Minerva, and Tonks swirled her remaining beer in her glass, thinking of inky waves on midnight beaches. A slight blonde woman in a leather jacket took a seat at the bar next to her.

"Another one of the same, Ralph, thanks," the woman said. She had an exotic accent. Australian?

She turned to Tonks. "Newlyweds?"

Tonks nodded and waggled her ring finger in the air. "Yeah."

"Ah, good on you." Definitely Australian.

"How can you tell?" asked Tonks.

"Way he looks at you. Like you're the second coming, and he's terrified he'll be judged unworthy for eternal paradise. How long you been hitched?"

"Just today." Tonks could not help smiling. Her face felt like it had been hit with a stretching jinx.

"Ah, wedding night! Lucky you. These buttoned-up English types are always panthers in the sack, aren't they?" The blonde scooped up her lager and patted Tonks on the shoulder. "Have fun. Make some memories."

The woman rejoined her companions at the billiards table in the back. Tonks could not metamorphose away her blush. Maybe Remus' reserve was rubbing off on her.

Remus returned, looking more worried than he had done a moment ago. He sat down beside Tonks.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"I was going to ask you the same question," he said.

Tonks surveyed the tavern a final time, her Auror reflexes on autopilot, silently scanning, as always. "You know what? Let's get out of here. We could Apparate. Anywhere you like."

Remus picked up the last chip in the basket, tore it in half, and offered her the bigger piece. "Let's go home," he said.

...

"Do you think he would have done it? Draco. I only met him once, and that was by accident," said Tonks as she opened the door to her tiny rental in Hogsmeade. "I was with Mum in Diagon Alley and he was buying school things. Wouldn't have known it was him, but she pointed him out."

"That's right, he's your cousin," said Remus. "I keep forgetting."

"You taught him, didn't you, at Hogwarts? What's he like?"

He considered this as he sealed the door with a security charm. "Oh. Certainly misguided. And spoiled, it's probably fair to say. But not, I think, a killer."

"Poor kid. That lot won't be happy with him."

"I don't like to think about it. It's awful for all of them, everyone their age. Harry has it worst, of course, but they're all involved. Hermione. Ginny. Neville."

"Neville's the one whose parents were both Aurors."

Remus' eyebrows pinched together. "Yes. They were in the Order. We were friends."

He lingered by the door, and she knew he was lost in memories for a minute. He had lost all of them, hadn't he. Every person he had ever loved. Most of them within the same twenty-four hours. She grieved inwardly for the Remus she had never met, the Remus before Lily and James died and his whole life imploded like a house of cards. She had seen flashes of that younger Remus from time to time, and she liked him; he was a cheeky little arse with a fondness for moody music, primarily Joni Mitchell and The Velvet Underground. But she loved Remus as he was, too: dog-eared and water-stained, with one or two pages ripped out.

Tonks had not thus far pushed Remus for his whole romantic history, lest she rekindle his avoidance of her. But she had cobbled together his and Sirius' off-handed comments and oblique references enough to surmise that Remus had rarely, if ever, slept around. There had been a French witch, briefly, before Sirius went to Azkaban, but apparently nothing lasting came of it. And he may have carried a torch for Harry's mum, though it was doubtful much happened there, either. Of the hand-to-mouth life he led between the wars, she knew very little. So it was possible that she would be his first lover ever. And if that was the case, she wanted tonight to be excellent for him. Her own deflowering at the clammy hands of a fellow Hufflepuff had left a lot to be desired.

Remus slipped off his battered leather oxfords and nudged them against the doorframe at a perfect right angle. Then he took off his socks, folded them, and set them atop his suitcase – the small brown one embossed _R J Lupin _in silver letters. She followed suit, unbuckling her platform shoes and peeling off her blue tights. She threw the tights into the pile by the bed – the deal-with-it-later pile – and her new husband straightened her shoes, setting them perpendicular to the door, too. She cringed inwardly.

"Bet you're going mad in here. All my mess," she said. She padded over to the stereo and flipped through their two piles of records – hers a wobbly stack, his an alphabetized box.

"Not really. Your mess is charming. Am I driving you mad with my compulsive neatness? Play that new one, will you?"

"Okay. No, I admire your neatness. They say we're drawn to people we're supposed to learn from."

His smirk was audible. She could hear it even with her back to him.

"What?" she asked.

"I'm overdue for a serious lesson from you, then," he said. _Charming cad._

She unsheathed the record from its paper sleeve and set the needle on the song she knew he liked. The tune poured forth, mellow and beautiful.

"Yes, this one," he said, closing his eyes. "You don't realize, until you're outside civilization for a while, how much music makes a difference." She looked at him. He was lost again, but this time, he didn't seem to be anywhere too horrible.

"Hey," she said. She crossed the room and threaded her index fingers through the front belt loops of his trousers.

"Hello," he said, coy, as she drew his hips toward her. He was taller than she was, but not by much.

"Hey," she said again. "I married you."

"You did indeed."

Then it hit her like a stunning spell to the solar plexus. "Hang on, you're letting me flirt with you."

"I thought you might find that appropriate on your wedding night."

"But you never let me."

"Yes I do. I think that's how we found ourselves in this situation, Dora."

There he was, that cheeky, undamaged Remus who showed up every so often. She kissed him hard, and he answered back soft, and their rhythms met in the middle, lips adjusting, tongues advancing. Yep, definitely still tasted like the same man who she'd married this afternoon. He was not some Polyjuiced impostor. She broke the kiss and looked up into his face. He blinked heavily. And his pupils were expanding with focused desire, black over his blue-grey irises – an eclipse.

He toyed with the frog clasp at the top of her red dress, right above her collarbone. "Alright if I-"

"Please."

He unfastened the clasp, and then the next three, too, at a maddeningly slow pace. She went to work on his shirt buttons. Each released button was like a benediction, a prayer, a bead of a rosary. Thank. God. This. Is. Finally. Happening.

She felt the front panel of her dress fall open, exposing her right breast.

"More buttons," he said, pulling the fabric back. "Curiouser and curiouser."

"Only two, though," she said, mouth dry, fingers still picking at his shirt.

He reached across her waist, under the wraparound part of the dress, and snapped open the interior buttons. Free of its bindings, the slippery fabric wanted to fall off her, but he held the ends closed in front of her, like a dressing gown. God, he was being so gentlemanly she could smack him. And where was this panther in the sack she'd been promised?

"Please," she said again, and he released her dress.

She rolled the dress off her shoulders and let it fall. She swallowed. Her hands shook. He pulled her in to him, crossing his arms behind her. He was warm, and still too thin, but she loved being held like this. He smelled lovely, and familiar, and –

"Oh," she said. "Oh, this is so cliché. But you smell like Amortentia. I always thought that was shite. Something people say to each other but don't really mean."

He hid his smile in her bubblegum-pink hair. The music kicked up into the bridge. Lyrics repeated in minor chords, and a trumpet called out to a violin like a desperate, jilted lover.

Tonks' eyes and sinuses tingled strangely. "Fuck," she said, wiping away a tear she hadn't realized was there. "Oh, fuck, Remus, we're _married_."

He pulled back and searched her face, a line between his brows. The unreality she had felt all day was melting, and it unhinged something in her as it went. Her heart felt like a hummingbird wrenching itself free of a closed fist.

"Damn it, I worried so goddamn much about you all year," she said. He brushed away the next two tears with his thumb. "I thought you would rather _die _than be with me. I thought you were going to leave me behind."

She sensed something shift behind his eyes, behind that eclipse of pupil and iris. Her own eyes seemed to have become silent fountains.

"No. I would never wish that on you," he said.

Oh.

Of course. This was _Remus_. The one who had been called _Moony _until nobody was left to call him that. Of course he knew about being left behind. He was a bloody expert.

He pulled her in again and pressed the bridge of his nose against her damp cheek. The music tapered into silence, a studio fadeout. The stereo whispered white noise and spat out a few electric clicks.

"Fuck, sorry. I never cry," she said. She sniffed.

He brushed her face with his thumb again. "Your nose is doing something," he said.

She clapped her hand over her face. Her nose _was _moving. Not much, just wiggling, a little like a rabbit's, testing its borders. The magic was coming back. She felt all her neurons light up for a moment, like strands of fairy lights running through her whole body, eyelash to toenail. For a moment she was aware of _everything _–the discarded clothes under her feet, her husband's warm hand at the nape of her neck, and every atom spinning through her skin. Her body had finally decided that she was not, in fact, half-dead with unrequited love, and all the dams she'd spent two years building within herself burst.

_You'd know perfectly well who I've fallen for, if you weren't too busy feeling sorry for yourself to notice._

Well, he knew now. It had taken years, and one or two tragedies, but he bloody well knew now.

She ran her fingers through the silvery hair at his temples.

"From now on, I go where you go," she said. "However dangerous. I can't stay behind and worry about you. I _can't_. I'm not that kind of witch. I'm not going to be that kind of wife."

He looked rueful, but he nodded. She buried her face in his neck.

"Sorry, that was so unsexy of me. Going all Moaning Myrtle on you," she said.

He snorted.

"Give me a minute. Want to brush my teeth," she said.

She planted a kiss on his stubbly jaw and then walked to the bathroom, tiptoeing over the odd socks that carpeted her floor.

The bathroom was more or less a dim broom closet with a couple of taps, but its evidence of cohabitation lifted her mood. Two toothbrushes in the holder. The shower head adjusted higher to accommodate a taller person. His comb set exactly ninety degrees from the back edge of the vanity.

She splashed cold water on her face. She caught her reflection in the mirror; she was glowing almost supernaturally. Whether that was due to her return to full magical ability or to normal bridal glow, she could not say.

She picked up Remus' dental floss and fiddled with it. _Married people floss every day, don't they? _Maybe she would take a crack at it.

Two minutes later, she emerged. A grey owl she had never seen before perched on the dining chair, and Remus was reading a letter.

"Your dental floss is shite. I'm buying you the nice stuff first thing tomorrow," she said.

He frowned.

"What's up?" she asked.

"Minerva thinks you should move. She has intelligence that Ministry employees are already being targeted. We should ask Alastor, but I'm sure she's right."

"Guess we're spending tomorrow looking for a flat, then," she said. "I've always wanted to live somewhere cool. Portobello road, maybe. You?"

His frown melted into a slack-jawed smile.

"Let's try this again," she said.

She crossed the room, unbuckled his belt, and stuck her tongue in his ear. He laughed wickedly. She dragged her teeth across his neck, over the pulse point.

"Dora, be careful about that," he breathed. "You probably shouldn't break the skin."

_He's thinking about Bill Weasley,_ she thought.

"I won't. Trust me," she said. She kissed him again, more softly, and that seemed to quell the specter of apprehension she had raised. "Trust me," she said again.

He hummed through his nose. "I should let Minerva's owl out."

"Okay."

He did. The summer night air drifted in. He closed the window again and set another security charm on it.

She leaned against him, inhaling that _Amortentia_ smell – pine trees and leatherbound books. He encircled her with his arms again.

"Do you want me to-"

"Yes, whatever it is, I want you to," she said.

He unhooked her bra, and then knelt in front of her, reverent yet amused. His warm breath tickled her stomach. "Your pants have little snitches on them," he said.

"Yeah, they do."

"As much as I enjoy Quidditch..." he said.

He slid them off, and folded them, and she snickered at his neatness. Honestly, who folds _pants_?

Then he carried her to bed, and she wasn't laughing, she was just smiling, and breathing hard, and saying _yes_ every time he asked her permission to go further.

After a while, she realized it was not because he was uncertain of her consent, but because he just liked hearing her say yes.

…

In the small hours of the morning, an iron church bell tolled.

"You don't have to answer," said Tonks.

She and Remus lay on their backs in her bed, looking up at the ceiling, her left hand closed in his right. With her wand, she drew glowing, colored lines in the air, and they hung there, serpentine, iridescent. It was pointless, pretty magic. The sort of thing teenage witches do alone in their beds.

"You're not the first," he said. "But you're the first in a very long time."

She tilted her head toward him. "How long ago?"

He held up both hands and indicated a number on his fingers. Eight.

Oh. Eight _years_.

"Were you in love with whoever it was?"

"No."

The twisting, luminous spellwork strand ate its own tail – an ouroboros. Infinity.

"But I love _you_," he said.

_There. _He loved someone who was still alive.

She put down her wand and kissed each of his eyelids, and the infinite rainbow loop evaporated. He purred with pleasure.

She vowed never to let him be left behind again. She hoped he would do the same for her.


End file.
